


North Cave

by Naraht



Category: North Face - Mary Renault, Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Additional Warnings May Apply, Caves, Class Issues, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-14
Updated: 2015-11-14
Packaged: 2018-05-01 14:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5210084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New guests at Wier View give Miss Fisher and Miss Searle a great deal to discuss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	North Cave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



"It's a doctor and his wife," said Mrs. Kearsey, bustling through the lounge on an errand. "Fleming. Here by lunchtime, they said. I hope they won't be the sort to let food go to waste."

Having exhausted one another's company within minutes of becoming acquainted, both Miss Searle and Miss Fisher received the word of new paying guests with gratitude.

"Rather a man on his own," said Miss Fisher cheerfully. "But you can't have everything, can you?"

Miss Searle, looking up from her copy of _Dr. Thorne_ , allowed reluctantly that this was the case.

"Given your line of work I imagine you'll have a great deal to talk about," she added.

"I shouldn't wonder," responded Miss Fisher, though inwardly she had her doubts. 

Apart from the most junior of housemen, doctors rarely showed much interest in social conversation with nurses. Certainly not while on holiday with their wives. She thought it far more likely that the Flemings would consider her beneath their notice, while reckoning Miss Searle a socially congenial companion. They would discuss Trollope, Chaucer and Housman - she blinked her sandy lashes quickly and involuntarily at the unwelcome memory - and leave her to her own thoughts. (To Miss Fisher, temperamentally suited to extroverted activity, this possessed its own horrors.)

"Queer that they're coming here, though, don't you think?" she added. "Wouldn't a hotel in Barlock have done them better, or someplace with a bit more – society?"

It occurred to her too late that Miss Searle might take this as a critique of her own social standing; although she could not have discerned the precise gradations of class between a medical man and an Oxford academic, she had a strong suspicion that doctors – once past the resident stage, at least – could afford better than Mrs. Kearsey's boarding house.

Miss Searle looked around the sitting room with an appraising air. "Perhaps they wanted some peace and quiet."

Miss Fisher rightly took this as a conversational close and went back to her book.

***

As promised the Flemings arrived just before lunch. 

First in evidence was the wife, who entered the lounge briskly and without ceremony. Of indeterminate middle age – perhaps not much more than forty, perhaps a few years older – she had good bone structure, though her face was marked by fatigue and she wore little makeup. Her chestnut hair, disarranged by the journey, showed a few streaks of silver. The tweeds she wore, though well-cut and flattering, were of an obviously pre-war vintage.

"Hilary Fleming," she said. "How do you do. We've just..." She looked behind her. "Julian, my dear, do come though."

Miss Searle and Miss Fisher heard him before they saw him: a voice just offstage, perfectly modulated and faultlessly well-spoken. "I'm sorry, Hilary, I was only looking at the garden."

Even with this warning, the possessor of the voice came as a surprise. He was a very young man, certainly under thirty, and with the sort of careless beauty going so far beyond simple good looks that it leads an onlooker to resent, rather than appreciate, its possessor. So thought Miss Searle, at least, both these instincts battling within her for supremacy. Miss Fisher's reactions were simpler.

 _Can't be more than a resident,_ she thought. _But how on earth did she catch him? Blimey. Wouldn't you like to know._

A moment later she wondered whether Mrs. Kearsey had made some mistake and if they were not, after all, mother and son. It was certainly possible – Hilary Fleming could be older than she looked, and her manner towards the young man had a distinct air of the maternal – but then it was equally possible that they were husband and wife. As a nurse Miss Fisher had seen every conceivable variation of family arrangements and had learned, after a few painful lessons in her student days, to reserve judgment until receiving specific information. She only hoped that Miss Searle would show similar good sense.

"How do you do," said the young man with a charming and unnecessary diffidence, as though he were afraid of intruding upon their privacy. "Julian Fleming."

"How do you do, Doctor Fleming," said Miss Fisher.

A look of faint, apologetic embarassment came across the young man's face, as though he had been caught out in an inexcusible social _faux pas_ which only he possessed the gentility to discern. He cast an appealing glance towards Mrs. Fleming, then turned it upon Miss Fisher; she was far from unmoved, though she hardly understood what was being asked of her.

"Just plain old Julian Fleming, I'm afraid," he said. "My wife is the doctor."

 _So she is his wife after all,_ thought Miss Fisher. She had time for a brief, sinking disappointment before being struck by the crushing consciousness of her own _faux pas_ , for which there was after all no excuse.

"Of course, of course," she put in quickly. "We've two woman doctors at my hospital. There are some things men just aren't any good for, I always say."

Mrs. Fleming made no comment on this observation, although Miss Searle, silently, seemed to approve.

"Which hospital is that?" asked Mrs. Fleming, fixing Miss Fisher with a rather piercing gaze and matter-of-factly taking a seat across from her. "You're a nurse, I suppose?"

Miss Fisher answered; a brief exchange established that, although they could find no professional connection, each held the greatest respect for the other's institution. This was true as far as it went, for Miss Fisher had heard good things of Bridstowe General. She was, however, just as happy that they possessed no common acquaintance, for it could only have emphasised the gulf, almost unbridgeable even in a boarding house miles from the most rudimentary of medical services, between a general surgeon and a ward sister.

That was as far as the conversation went; she suspected that Mrs. Fleming was equally, if not more, pleased at not having an acquaintance in common.

All the occupants of the lounge looked up with relief when Mrs. Kearsey came through to announce that lunch was ready. Mr Fleming stood to one side as the women left the room, then followed his wife quickly through.

 _We'll see if they're as keen on the idea,_ thought Miss Fisher, _once they see what's on the table._

***

 _With a face like that,_ thought Miss Searle, making her way up the stairs after lunch, _naturally he would be an actor._

Despite her dislike for the Renaissance she had always been fond of Shakespeare, and felt obscurely that actors, in putting him on the stage, did an essential disservice to the text. One understood of course that the plays had been written to be performed but that was a matter for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and could have no bearing upon the present day.

Unfortunately the topic had been unavoidable once Miss Fisher and Mrs Fleming had exhausted their discussion of hospitals sufficiently for Mrs Fleming to enquire as to her own occupation.

Both of the Flemings had been at Oxford, it transpired. Mrs Fleming had read biology at a college which traditionally considered itself the intellectual superior of Miss Searle's own; Mr Fleming had, he cheerfully confessed, actually read English, and taken a third.

This had been enough to class him firmly within Miss Searle's mind; it was obvious that no man of intelligence, if he possessed even the slightest degree of application, could have done so poorly. Certainly if he had, he would never have admitted to it in polite company. She had known Julian Fleming's type at Oxford, albeit at a distance, and had felt (she told herself) no desire to know them any more intimately.

It had not helped to hear Mr Fleming say that he was planning to audition for the Barchester Rep immediately after leaving Wier View. One saw now, of course, that provincial rep was the only possible place for him.

To her mind there was something faintly sordid about the connection of Mrs Fleming to her husband, for one could see that she had not been drawn by his intellect. What had drawn Mr Fleming to his wife was less clear; Miss Searle told herself firmly that it could be no concern of hers.

Reaching her room, Miss Searle shut and locked the door with a sigh. Its pink rayon decor had never before seemed so much of a refuge. She had certainly not come all the way to Wier View to spend her holiday indoors, but perhaps a brief nap during the heat of the day would refresh her for an evening spent with Chaucer.

She stopped in the midst of turning down the coverlet. There was a sound of voices and footsteps coming up the stairs. It was, unmistakeably, the Flemings. Miss Searle remembered too late that the room next to her was - or had been, until this moment - vacant. It struck her as an affront that it had been given away, although she had heard from Mrs Kearsey at breakfast that the house would be full by the evening. 

Her own window was open to catch the breeze. North-facing, it gave onto a grassy field which dazzled with reflected sunlight. After a moment the window in the next room was opened, and the voices suddenly became perfectly clear.

"...seems almost dead-alive somehow," Mrs Fleming was saying, though Miss Searle was never to learn who or what was being described.

"But look at this room," interrupted Mr Fleming in tones of awe.

"I know, darling, but it can't matter in the dark, can it? There really wasn't anywhere else, not at such short notice."

"Of course not. But my God, it really is ghastly; one couldn't have done it worse if one tried. I feel I ought to make a special study. Chris will want to know all."

Miss Searle sat down heavily upon her bed. She did not appreciate being made to feel an eavesdropper; but the Flemings' voices, however considerately modulated, were impossible to ignore.

"But what shall we do this afternoon?" asked Mr Fleming. "Go out, or stay in?"

"Go out, certainly."

There was a long silence which suggested the decision was in some doubt. Miss Searle found herself straining to hear, in that agony of dread that seeks to prove what it fears most. The soft noises issuing from the other side of the wall might have been anything.

"Yes, we'll go out," said Mr Fleming after a short time, with fresh resolution. "I read that there are some lovely caves nearby, just east of here."

A long pause. "Darling, no. I should never have let you get hold of the guidebook on the train."

"They're as safe as houses, really they are, as long as one's sensible enough to look at the tide tables. There's no scrambling down ladders either; you can walk right in from the beach and then walk straight through. At low tide, anyway."

"I can't think of anything I should like to do less."

"Don't say that," said Mr Fleming quickly. "Don't look at me like that, like..."

Another long silence, shocked, as though he had drawn from one of those caves an unspeakable truth, and given it voice.

"Perhaps she had reason."

The floorboards protested, anguished cries; someone was pacing back and forth.

"I'll go by myself," he said finally.

"If you've a death wish..."

"I suppose you'd be happy if I did."

"Oh Julian," said Mrs Fleming, her voice rising to a pitch of exasperation, "how _can_ you be such a fool?"

"I'm going," he replied quietly, his voice tight. "I'm sorry to have upset you; I suppose I should have just said I was going climbing. I'll go now. I'll be back by teatime."

***

Miss Fisher had intended to spend the afternoon by herself in the garden, sunbathing and perhaps doing a bit of reading. She was surprised to find that Mrs Fleming had apparently had the same idea.

 _Has he gone off and left her on her lonesome?_ she thought, lingering by the doorway. _On the first day too, that's rather nice. I wonder._

Too much a pragmatist to imagine that even a dutiful husband would be perpetually enamoured of his wife's company, she nonetheless felt a certain pleasure in the reality that even the best of marriages could have the odd awkward patch. Particularly this marriage, for young Mr Fleming – whose unassuming air of bohemianism did not interfere with his being exceedingly well-scrubbed, and who was brainy enough to discuss Shakespeare over lunch – would have been close to her ideal of manhood even if his wife had not let slip over lunch that he had been a pilot in the RAF during the war. 

_And that face of his doesn't hurt at all,_ she thought happily. She was, in her own way, as much a believer in the sanctity of marriage as Miss Searle – but even if she had not been, she would never have entertained the idea of pursuing Mr Fleming. Even setting his age to one side (as Mrs Fleming obviously had not), he was unequivocally beyond her. _But there's no harm in looking._

Out in the garden, Mrs Fleming had settled herself in one of the deck chairs, a book lying open and unregarded on her lap. Her pale, bare legs were stretched out in the grass, skirt tucked up around her knees. She must, thought Miss Fisher, have been quite a good-looking woman once; she could still be considered good looking, even with a figure gently relaxing into middle age. She wore a light sleeveless blouse showing freckled shoulders – her colouring was only a little darker than Miss Fisher's own. There were two buttons left open at the neck, showing skin that was sun and age-roughened at the hollow of the throat, transitioning thence to a smooth whiteness that might have belonged to a much younger woman.

 _She'll be red as a lobster by the evening,_ thought Miss Fisher, but she did not feel qualified to lecture a general surgeon on the risks posed by her pigmentation.

Instead she stepped into the garden, thinking to skirt danger by carrying one of the vacant chairs to a spot suitably distant. Her shadow betrayed her, falling for a moment across the other woman's face.

Mrs Fleming jerked awake with a start. Blinking, she sat up and looked searchingly around the garden. One could see that in her professional line she was used to quick awakenings.

"How embarassing." She closed her book, leaving the title plain on the dust jacket. Miss Fisher was both relieved and surprised to see it was one she herself had read and enjoyed; she would have expected something brainier. "It serves me right for having brought something I've read before. Why did Harriet Vane stop writing? One always wonders: was it the war, or marriage?"

Miss Fisher thought she knew the answer, but judged it might be better not to reply.

"Sorry to have woken you," she said instead. She had the tone of this right at least; it was the same jaunty acceptance of the unavoidable that she deployed in the ward every morning, when waking the patients to take their temperatures. "I was only wanting to do a bit of reading myself."

"I oughtn't to be sleeping my holiday away in any case."

Mrs Fleming sat bolt upright in her chair, fighting the natural sag of the canvas with rigorous good posture. She scanned the horizon, apparently saw nothing worthy of note, and sat back with a sigh.

"Do pull up a chair," she added.

As it was hardly possible to decline with good grace, Miss Fisher did so, feeling a clenching at the pit of her stomach at the thought of having to carry conversation without the assistance of Miss Searle.

Unable to identify any other common subject, they fell back upon the usual anodynes about the weather, the beauty of the area, and what had brought them to Wier View. They spoke of the prospects for sightseeing, trading observations which they both had derived, without intervening reflection, straight from the guidebooks.

Miss Fisher was forced to admit that she had neither visited the castle nor taken the time to admire the Norman porch of the little local church. She felt convicted by the fact, as though it had been wrong to choose to spend a day sunbathing on the beach, after months of night shifts during which she had hardly seen the sun.

 _After all, my money is as good as hers,_ she reflected indignantly, though Mrs Fleming had suggested nothing to the contrary. _She's staying here at Wier View, the same as I am._

"We thought of waiting for the Continent," Mrs Fleming explained, putting an immediate stop to this line of thought. "But in the end we decided it was better to get away somewhere for a proper holiday before..."

Her voice trailed off, indicating reserve or perhaps a certain delicacy.

"...before the baby was born," she finished with a note of decision.

Miss Fisher looked again, as surreptitiously as she could manage. _Of course,_ she thought, _I was a fool not to have noticed._

"Oh, _my_ ," she responded encouragingly, feeling herself suddenly upon firmer ground. "Congratulations in order."

Miss Fisher maintained what she considered to be a professional interest in babies. One might as well call it that. Though she was an active and enthusiastic aunt, she had never been offered the opportunity to take a personal interest. Not without the prospect of scandal, at least.

"Yes, my first, elderly primipara," said Mrs Fleming as if seeking to forstall this very question. "It was a case of now or never."

"Well, the _oldest_ mum I've had was forty-seven." Miss Fisher paused for a moment, wondering if Mrs Fleming were near this age. But it seemed unlikely. "It was her eleventh, though. One hardly has to do a thing for that sort. They know it all, can't tell them anything. And when the time comes they just..."

An expressive gesture conveyed all she wished to say about the birthing process.

"And then they haemorrhage," said Mrs Fleming.

"Five years I spent in maternity," said Miss Fisher, warming to her theme. "I could tell you tales..."

From that point on, if Miss Fisher remembered that she was speaking to a doctor, it was only as a point of fact. All constraint between them had vanished.

***

Having intended to nap, Miss Searle had found her room altogether too hot and close, uncongenial even in the silence left by the departure of the Flemings. The garden had seemed as if it would provide a quiet and undemanding refuge, now that the afternoon was moving onwards and the sun was past its height.

Coming outside, however, she was assailed by the sound of brisk and forthright voices discussing a subject which was surely – _surely_ – not meant for the open air. _After all, anyone might be listening,_ Miss Searle thought, hardly including herself within the category.

One might have thought that a woman such as Mrs Fleming, who gave every indication of having been well brought up, would have possessed some natural resistance to the coarsening effects of hospital life. But clearly this was not the case.

Miss Fisher waved showily from across the garden, greeting Miss Searle with a cheery "yoo-hoo!" There was no escape.

Miss Searle sensed the constraint that descended as soon as she joined the other women. She was glad of this – for she could not have borne the unshrinking anatomical explicitness that seemed natural to the medical profession – and yet curiously reluctant to have been the cause of it.

They looked at one another. They looked around the garden. There was no obvious source of conversation. The sun beat down on the hedgerows and on the fields beyond. From a long way off one could hear the faint lowing of cows. The silvery sea was only just visible in the distance; it appeared to have discreetly withdrawn itself from the scene.

 _Perhaps if one were a countrywoman,_ thought Miss Searle. But she had been raised in Highgate and the topic of farming seemed, to her, just as obscure and potentially alarming as that of hospitals. Besides which she did not imagine that either of the other women could have anything to say to it.

Eventually, with some relief, they settled upon Coleridge. Mrs Fleming said that she and her husband had stopped to see his cottage only just before arriving at Wier View. Though, she said, she did not consider herself a literary person – one could have guessed this, thought Miss Searle, from the mystery novel sitting on her knees – she had enjoyed it thoroughly.

This might have been more convincing if Mrs Fleming had not trailed off halfway through her account of the visit. So thought Miss Searle for a moment. Then she looked up, following the other woman's gaze down to the tunnel of greenery at the bend in the lane. There was a man coming down the road. Mr Fleming had returned.

All conversation lapsed as he approached. Windblown, splashed and sandy – from the state of his trouser cuffs it seemed he had done some paddling – he gazed at his wife as though she were an oasis in the desert. She looked back at him with a similar expression.

"I'm back," he said, "You see, I told you I'd be fine."

"Yes. I'm glad." 

For a moment she seemed to be able to find nothing else to say. Then she added: "We've been talking about the Person from Porlock, darling."

"Of course," said Mr Fleming gratefully. Then, as easily as if he had been prompted, he began to recite: " _In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree..._ "

"Do go on," Miss Fisher said, looking at him with a rapt expression that seemed entirely unfeigned.

He did so; indeed, he went on to the end of the poem, by which time Miss Searle found herself, for the first time in her life, more than grateful for the intervention of the Person from Porlock. She thought his recitation unutterably showy; it was obviously bent upon effect, employing all the usual showy tricks of the trained actor.

"What a lovely poem!" exclaimed Miss Fisher.

Mr Fleming dipped his eyes with a graceful modesty, for all the world as if he had been the author.

"All down to the effects of opium, of course," said Miss Searle.

"Of course," echoed Mrs Fleming in a rather different tone.

"Was it really?" said Miss Fisher, feeling a dawning interest in literature that had never been prompted by the lessons at school.

"He was an addict," said Mrs Fleming. "The hallucinations are typical."

"But it took an artist to make something of them," said Mr Fleming.

Mrs Fleming looked fondly at her husband, in that way which makes onlookers feel slightly uncomfortable to be present. Again, there was a silence.

"Shall we go in?" asked Mr Fleming. 

Without being asked, he offered a hand to his wife. Mrs Fleming took it, and allowed him to help her out of the deck chair. 

"It must be nearly time to dress for dinner," she said, closing the open buttons on her shirt as though she had just noticed them. "Besides, it's past time I got out of the sun. I haven't the pigmentation for it..."

"Well!" Miss Fisher said after the Flemings were out of earshot. She had waited no longer than the minimum compelled by discretion. "I can't say _they_ were what I expected."

Miss Searle refrained from asking Miss Fisher what she had expected.

"And why did they not go off together this morning, that's what I'd like to know," continued Miss Fisher. "If it weren't for those eyes they were making at each other, you'd think they'd quarreled."

"They reconcile quickly," said Miss Searle, more tartly than she had intended. 

Only after she had spoken did she realise that, fatally, she had omitted the intended _perhaps_. Miss Fisher looked at her speculatively; it did not require an analytical intellect to have noticed that her room was next door to the Flemings.

"When a man is that good looking..." she began, testing the waters.

" _Not_ what one would call a well-matched couple," said Miss Searle.

By saying this she had of course confirmed Miss Fisher's suspicions. Inaccurately, for she still had not the slightest idea why they had quarreled, and considered herself above any further reflection on the question. Nonetheless she had felt the need to express her disapproval, even to such an audience as Miss Fisher.

"Poor woman," said Miss Fisher, reflecting that perhaps, after all, being single was not the worst of fates. "And I thought they seemed so happy together."

***

Earlier in the day Miss Searle had not been certain which was more to be feared: a continuation of the afternoon's argument or a reconciliation, with all that the latter might imply. Now that the Flemings had returned to their room, and she to her own, she knew beyond a doubt that the reconciliation was far worse.

Preparing herself for dinner, she looked in the mirror to apply her lip salve, and decided to wear the pearls that she had brought against possible need. There was no excuse for not looking put together, after all, even on holiday. 

From the room next door, as she fastened the clasp, she heard confused murmurings of 'darling' and 'my dear' and 'my beautiful' and even, more than once, 'my boy.' It was a woman's voice that spoke.

 _Well,_ thought Miss Searle, _so that's how it is._

She felt sorrow at being right – and, still more, an acute, bitter pity for every woman cursed by fate to worship her husband as a God.


End file.
